According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is hüzün, a Turkish word whose Arabic root denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, “a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.”

Hüzün is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of hüzün that causes the sufferer distress. “It is the failure to experience huzun,” Pamuk says, “that leads him to feel it.” According to Pamuk, moreover, hüzün is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. “What I am trying to explain,” he writes in this delightful, profound, marvelously original book, “is the hüzün of an entire city: of Istanbul.”

To me it is obvious, that hüzün describes also my feelings of missing Istanbul. For this pictures I used old pictures that I found in antique shops in Kadiköy, istanbul.